Reducing the overwhelm with ease

I am going to confess last weekend I was full up! I felt overwhelmed, I had too much to do with work, my MSc assignment, family. I thought my head was going to explode! I think it’s a feeling that we all experience from time to time and especially at this time of year.

However, I don’t know about you, but it’s easy to blame ourselves for being disorganised, not doing things sooner, or simply taking too much on. You would think by doing the work that I do, that I wouldn’t get to this point, that somehow all of my learnings and teachings would prevent it from happening. That is the wonderful thing about human psychology, we may understand it but we can’t prevent it. In other words we can’t remove our beautiful humanness!

Having said that, one of the most useful insights that I had was recognising what this state of mind was telling me, rather than what I thought it was. There was a time when I thought that when I felt overwhelmed and ‘full up’ that it meant I actually was, I would go into full blown fix it mode, trying to alleviate the overwhelm, by making decisions about what I was going to do, or not do, but more than that, I would inevitably end up going down a rabbit hole of what a failure I was for not being able to cope with all the plates that I was spinning. However, what I began to see is that this feeling of overwhelm was simply telling me that about my state of mind, and not the state of my circumstances and that given space and time, my state of mind would change and I would feel better – and my circumstances wouldn’t have changed a bit!

So now when I explore this with clients, I often liken it to the engine failure light that comes on our car. It looks scary and frightening at first as if that is the end of the car, but often when we take it to the garage it just needed a little bit of tweaking and some TLC and it’s soon back to old self. The engine failure light only tells us that something is wrong – it can’t give us any more details than that.

After a little gentle prompting from my lovely husband, I could see this on Sunday too – of course sometimes we don’t right away, and that’s ok, but I soon saw that my own psychological ‘engine failure’ warning light had come on. I had arranged to go to the cinema with a lovely friend, which in my overwhelmedness had nearly cancelled as I had far too much to do, but was so pleased I hadn’t because the break was exactly what I needed. After being absorbed by the big screen for a couple of hours and a lovely catch up I had regained my perspective on life. Nothing had changed in my circumstances, my work, my MSc, and my family was all exactly the same, but how I felt about it all was so different.

So if you are feeling a little overwhelmed too, that’s ok, it’s nothing that needs to be fixed, you don’t need a new diary system or a new blueprint to increase your productivity. It’s simply your own psychological lights coming on as a reminder to slow down, take a break and you’ll soon be back on track where life feels easier and more doable.

with love,

Andrea x

p.s if you would like to learn more about how understanding your state of mind can impact the success of your professional career or business, let’s have a chat. To find a time to suit you click here.

Andrea Morrison is a Transformational Coach, Tedx Speaker, Writer and Columnist for The Yorkshire Post. Find out more about her forthcoming events and programmes on her website: www.andreamorrison.co.uk